Tagged Image File Format (abbreviated TIFF) is a file format for mainly storing images, including photographs and line art. Originally created by the company Aldus, jointly with Microsoft, for use with PostScript printing, TIFF is a popular format for high color depth images, along with JPEG and PNG. TIFF format is widely supported by image-manipulation applications such as Photoshop by Adobe, GIMP, Ulead PhotoImpact and Paint Shop Pro by Jasc, by desktop publishing and page layout applications, such as QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign, and by scanning, faxing, word processing, optical character recognition, and other applications. Adobe Systems, which acquired the PageMaker publishing program from Aldus, now controls the TIFF specification.

History

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The phrase "Tagged Image File Format", or, actually, "Tag Image File Format", was used as a subtitle in some earlier versions of the TIFF specification. The current TIFF specification, TIFF 6.0, makes no mention of these phrases; the name is now, simply, "TIFF".

TIFF was originally created as an attempt to get desktop scanner vendors of the mid-1980's to agree on a common scanned image file format, rather than have each company promulgate its own proprietary format. In the beginning, TIFF was only a bilevel image format, since that was all that desktop scanners could handle. As scanners became more powerful, and as desktop computer disk space became more plentiful, TIFF grew to accommodate grayscale images, then color images.

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